


out of the dust

by maplemood



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Families of Choice, Father Figures, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Jakku, MayThe4th Treat, Orphans, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-11
Updated: 2018-05-11
Packaged: 2019-04-30 10:09:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14494644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: He drops by Jakku for a steal on old engine parts and leaves with a half-starved, more than half-feral child.





	out of the dust

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saiditallbefore](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saiditallbefore/gifts).



> Hi! I fell in love with your prompts about Han & Rey and Chewbacca & Rey and couldn't resist writing something. I hope you like it!

**_han_ **

Kid’s a monster. A scrappy, sharp-toothed monster, half-naked but for some rags, blistered by the desert sun, and lean as a junkyard rat, and for all those reasons and more Han can’t leave her. He drops by Jakku for a steal on old engine parts and leaves with a half-starved, more than half-feral child.  

“Clothes will cost you extra,” grunts the heaving wad of bantha snot who, after an hour of searching, he’s managed to pin down as the closest thing to a caretaker she has. “The boots, too.”

“From a nice guy like you? I’m shocked,” Han says, but he counts out the credits, the exact price thugs like Plutt place on a human life. He slaps them down on the table, then walks away without looking back.

Tries to. The kid—the monster’s screeching, her little sunburned face not much more than a gaping mouth full of crooked, gleaming teeth. Her planted feet dig furrows in the sand as he drags her, and with every inch the howls only grow louder, to the point where he’s genuinely afraid she’ll pass out.

Han stops. “Hey!”

Back behind the counter, Plutt sweeps a protective arm over the credits. “No refunds.”

“I’m not looking for one, asshole.” He hefts the monster’s arm higher before she can snap at his fingers. “What’s her name?”

A shrug.

“Come on,” says Han, all patience he doesn’t actually feel. “You had to call her something.”

“I didn’t,” Plutt snaps, like that’s an insult, and on a world like Jakku, where there’s a price on weakness, same as everything else, maybe it is. Still, he pauses. “I didn’t,” he repeats, “but the junkers who dropped her off called her Rey.”

+

She screams as he drags her onto the _Falcon_.

She screams as they take off.

As they break atmosphere, shooting for the black of space, she strains against the buckles of her seat, screams, and smashes her skull into the headrest, again and again. At some point, the shrieks and snarls coalesce into exactly three words.

“Take me back! Take me back!”

“Ben, make sure she doesn’t bash her brains out,” Han grunts through clenched teeth. He twists the controls so that the ship harpins around a passing asteroid; the screaming continues.

“Take me—”

“What the hell did I just tell you?”

“What about my brains?” Ben growls, sliding to one side of his seat as they take another curve, even sharper this time. “Mom’s going to tear you a new one,” he adds.

Chewie roars.

“Hear that? She’d tear us all in half if she knew we’d left a kid on that dustball to die.” They’re not clear to make the jump to hyperspace yet. This asteroid field seems never ending and the noise isn’t helping Han’s concentration. “Get over there!” he snaps. “Now!”

A click as Ben unbuckles and a deliberately unmuffled curse. “Permission to use a Jedi mind trick?” he asks sarcastically.

“No. You know I don’t trust that shit.”

“Dad. She’s going to take off my fingers if I don’t.”

Chewie grunts in agreement.

“Fine,” Han growls,  dipping out of the path of another oncoming rock. “Just this once, you hear me?”

“Loud and clear,” his son shoots back, while the girl yowls on, inconsolable. Han sets his jaw, fixes his eyes forward. What the hell has he just gotten them into? Does he really want to know?

To be honest?

No.

 

**_ben_ **

The sleeping trick’s about the easiest thing there is. Ben was casting it by himself by the time he was eight years old—all it involves is shutting down certain parts of the mind while activating others. Multitasking, basically. Elementary.

On this kid, it takes ten minutes.

“Couldn’t pick just any orphan, old man?” he grumbles when he finally gets back to his seat, his fingers stinging. She managed to get a few good bites in, and Force knows what’s been growing on her teeth.

“What’re you talking about?” They’ve finally jumped to hyperspace. Han unbuckles, rolling his neck before stepping out of the pilot’s seat and stretching. “And don’t call me old man, son.”

“Don’t call me son, father.” Ben answers. He keeps the tired joke going because it sometimes seems like the only common ground they have left. Now he watches Han’s face. “She’s strong in the Force.”

“You mean that general, all-things-are-one-in-the-Force strength?” he asks hopefully.

“She picked up what I was doing,” Ben says, “and halfway through she started trying to turn it against me. She almost put _me_ to sleep. So, no.”

“Aw, kriff.” Han glances over to the seat where the girl is now slumped, twitching, moaning a little in her sleep. A thick string of drool dribbles down her chin and onto her bare, bruised shoulder.

 _Kriff,_ Ben echoes silently. _She’s so small._ Bones like matchsticks. A face that, in sleep, would be cute if it weren’t so scratched up. He almost wants to wake her, unbuckle her, tell her it’s all going to be okay.

No. She might be small, but the strength inside her isn’t. Far from it.

“How long before she comes to?” his dad asks.

Ben shrugs. “Five minutes?”

+

“You’re Ben,” she says as soon as she wakes up. The tendrils of her Force signature reach out for his, furious; he slams down his walls as fast as he can but there’s no guaranteeing something of her hasn’t slipped through. She’s unpracticed, unwieldy. He doubts she even realizes what she’s doing.

“Ben Solo,” he answers. “Who’re you?”

“I hate you,” she says. Rey—Han already knew her name but figured asking her for it might help them build a connection, or something—bucks against her straps again, panting. Her voice is little-kid shrill but hoarse all the way through. Tears glitter in her eyes. “You have to take me home. Take me home!”

Han’s in the galley. Chewie’s tinkering with something in the engine. All the same, Ben looks over his shoulder before leaning closer. “Why?”

Jakku’s a piss-bucket of a world, worse than Tatooine. There’s no reason to stay. Even a little girl who’s known nothing else must know that.

She glares at him for at least a full minute, skinny arms crossed over her skinny chest. “They forgot me,” she finally spits. “But they’re going to come back, so I need to be there, so—”

“Who forgot you?”

Rey doesn’t answer, but her mind teases open, just a little. It’s not an invitation, so Ben doesn’t go in, but he sees it from a distance. The biting sand, the burning sun, the screams and the ship roaring away. He sees more. Shadows, murk. The things she won’t let herself know.

“Your parents,” he says.

She crosses her arms tighter and won’t answer.

Ben doesn’t say the words aloud, but he thinks, _They never wanted you._ He feels it, in her fury and helplessness and denial. Rey is so small, but she’s ages older than she looks, in a way that—suddenly, without warning—all but breaks his heart.

_You’re just a kid. Kriff, just a little kid._

His walls are down, but he thinks she hears it, still. In any case, Rey lunges forward and does her level best to bite his nose off.

 

**_chewbacca_ **

Kid’s trouble. Doesn’t mean Han shouldn’t have picked her up—more reason to, probably.

But.

She’s trouble. Small ones always are.  

“Chewie!” Ben’s shouting somewhere over his head. “Where’re the bandages?”

Like he’s supposed to know every cranny on this rustbucket, except of course he does—then again, so does Han, and while Chewbacca’s rewiring one of the core reactors, a _very_ complicated, fiddly job, that bastard’s in the galley, frying up the last of his fresh-butchered, fresh-ground bantha chuck.

“What do you want me to do? Starve her until we get back to Chandrila?”

When he pointed out that there was a package of very fine Naboo blood sausages just waiting to sizzle in the pan, Han was all excuses. As he usually is.

“Don’t be stupid. I bought those specially for Leia.”

_I bought these specially for me._

“Think of the kid, Chewie,” said Han, and that was that, since he’s really too old and too tired to make a fuss every time the tight-pants nerf herder does something stupid.

“Chewie? Bandages!”

 _Left drawer by the cockpit,_ he growls.

The reactor flickers in his hands, buzzes worryingly. Chewbacca sure as hell hopes it’ll last them all the way back to Chandrila; again, he can’t fault Han for picking the kid up, but they sure could have used the spare parts.

+

“We have to get the bacta gel on somehow.” Han combs a spat-out piece of Chewbacca’s beloved chuck out of his hair. “Those burns look nasty.”

_She bites._

“So do you, you big baby. Just grab her in a bear hug, okay? There’s no way she can gum through all that fur, anyway.”

Chewbacca glares down at the kid.

She glares right back, her expression nothing if not _Don’t think I won’t try._

“You’re best with kids, Uncle Chewie,” Ben coaxes. The boy’s got a bloody bandage slapped over his nose but otherwise looks fine. Profoundly grateful that it’s not him having to hold the little sand-rat still.

“Ben’ll unbuckle her with the Force,” Han explains. “Then you pick her up and hold her out. Easy.”

_Kriff you. Right up a hutt’s ass._

“Love you too, buddy. On my count: one, two—”

“Do hutts even have asses?” Ben wonders as the buckles click loose. “Aren’t they just like huge worms?”

 _If it goes in, it has to come out,_ Chewbacca growls, and scoops the kid up as fast as he can, and kriff, she’s going to—

She starts thrashing right away. Her teeth aren’t sharp enough to get through his fur after all, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt when she chomps at his paws. She’s not heavy, nothing even approaching heavy; it’s like trying to keep your arms around a dust devil, though, the way she whips and bucks and kicks. Han slathers bacta gel on the burns flushing her arms and legs, the tops of her little feet. A thin high wail interrupts her screaming.

“Stop it!”

She thumps her head into Chewbacca’s chest, a solid _thunk_ over his breastbone.

“It hurts!”

“We’ve got to do her back now,” Han says, his voice a little unsteady. Beside him Ben looks queasy. “Can you turn her around, Chewie?”

Her back is peeling, bubbled in places. He feels the heat radiating off it, into his paws and bones. She wails again, fingers scrabbling in his fur, while Han, a muscle twitching in his jaw, smooths the gel over as gently as he can.

Which isn’t terribly gently, under the circumstances.

 _Can’t you put her to sleep again?_ Chewbacca roars.

“She’d fight it too hard. It would hurt her even more,” Ben says, strangled. “I’m sorry.”

He’s not saying it to him. He’s saying it to the kid, who’s in no state to pay attention, whose wails have melted to outright sobs and who’s hiding her face in Chewbacca's fur, almost limp, a burning coal against him.

“Kriffing bastard,” Han mutters. The rags she’s wearing are peeling away, some of them rotted to the point of disintegrating. “Kriffing _bastard.”_

“I want to go home,” she snuffles. “Take me, take me—”

Chewbacca pats her head. _Shhh,_ he says, though kriff knows how that’s going to help. This kid—Rey—isn’t anything like Ben was at her age, soft and spoiled and comforted by a couple lines of some quiet bedtime song.

 _Shhh,_ Chewbacca repeats. He begins to hum.

“How’s that going to help?” Ben hisses.

_You got a better idea, smart guy?_

 

**_han_ **

“How old is she?” Leia asks.

“She looks pretty malnourished,” he admits, dull fury still building behind his eyes like the pressure of a headache. “It’s hard to tell. Six, maybe? Seven?”

“Stars help her,” his wife mutters. “Did you feed her?”

“Tried to. She wouldn’t take it.”

“And Ben says she’s strong in the Force.”

“Very.”

“Stars help her,” she repeats.

Han blinks at her flickering figure on the holoprojector. He wants now, very badly, to be back home, in Leia’s bed and feeling nothing but the warm heavy brush of her hair as she bends down to kiss him, the press of her legs straddling his hips. Closeness. How much real closeness can this kid have known in her life?

Not much. It breeds emptiness, an emptiness he knows well.  Knew well, before Chewie and Luke and Leia, before Ben.

“Her name’s Rey,” he says.

“It’s a pretty name.”

“It is.”

“I miss you,” Leia says. Softly, and, as always, a little grudgingly.

“I know.”

“Don’t give me that. Just—bring her home, Han. We’ll worry about what to do with her once she gets here. Bring them all home.” She sighs, shakes her head. “Say goodnight to Ben for me.”

“I will. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

The projection flickers off.

+

Chewie, Ben, and Rey are all slumped in a tangled lump by Chewie’s bunk, snoring softly. The singing did actually calm the kid down, or else she got as exhausted by her flailing and screaming as everyone else. She still clings to Chewie’s chest, her head nestled under his paw, drowning in one of Ben’s spare shirts.

Ben himself is pressed against Chewie’s side with his head propped back against the edge of the bunk. One of his hands is thrown out, almost touching Rey’s sunburned foot, as if he wants to know when she wakes.

“Mom says goodnight,” Han whispers, then drops a quick, dry kiss to his son’s forehead, since when the kid’s either dying or out of it are apparently the only times he’s allowed to do that now. He pats Chewie’s shoulder, stops to give the girl one last look before heading off to his bunk, and realizes she’s started to stir.

 _Oh, hell,_ he thinks. When Rey’s eyes blink open they’re as furious as ever, but dulled with sleepiness. She doesn’t jump up, ready for battle. She just glares.

“I hate you.”

“That’s okay, kid.” He crouches a safe distance away, smothering his groan when the joints in his knees pop. _You’re not getting any younger, Solo._ “Hate all of us if you want. We can take it.”

“I want to go home.” She enunciates each word crystal-clearly, like maybe he didn’t understand the first five hundred times. “Why didn’t you leave me?”

“Rey,” Han says. “I couldn’t have left you.”

Her glare sharpens; for a second he worries she will spring up after all. “All I can do is find junk. You don’t look like junk traders.” She concludes, with a miserable kind of satisfaction, “I’m worth nothing to you.”

He doesn’t answer.

“Nothing!”

“Finding junk’s not the only thing you can do,” he says finally. “Not by a long shot. But even if it was, you wouldn’t have stayed there. Not on my watch.”

Chewie grumbles in his sleep. Even as she curls up to his chest Rey asks, “Why?”

Despite his better judgement, Han shuffles closer. “Because—and I know this is a new concept for you, kid, don’t expect to get it right away—you’re a person. You deserve better than that, no questions asked.”

“Because I’m a person,” she echoes flatly.

“That’s right.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It didn’t make sense to me at first, either,” Han says, a cold hard stone sinking to the bottom of his gut. “But that’s the way it is.” He straightens. “It’s late. We both need to sleep.”

“You’re stupid!” she snaps after him, still unwilling to leave the circle of Chewie’s arms.

“Maybe I am. You wouldn’t be the first person to tell me that.” Han turns his head. “Goodnight, Rey.”

She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t run for him, teeth bared, either; he figures it’s as close to a plus as they’ll get for now.

+

Han was her age once. Hard as it is for Ben, and sometimes even himself, to believe.

He was a kid, and he stumped through the streets of Corellia, fast-fingered because he had to be, quick-witted because his life depended on it. He was a kid, and he knew his parents weren’t coming back, cold in their graves as they were, but he believed it because he had to, because sometimes—most times—lying to yourself is the only kind of survival worth enduring.

He was a kid once. Han rolls into his bunk. He tries to forget that.

 

**_rey_ **

She tries to forget.

The man’s hands rubbing her burns with bacta gel, hurting worse than almost anything yet gentle all the same.

The boy’s face when he put her to sleep, stricken like he almost understood. How he didn’t hit her when she bit his face hard enough to draw blood.

The huge hairy thing that's holding her now, how it hummed deep in its chest and held her fast until she couldn’t cry anymore.

She tries to forget all of them, but she can’t.

She tries to will herself out of this ship, back light years to the burning sands of Jakku. Though she remembers it clear as day and sharp as the burns on her back, she can’t.

Worse, she’s not sure she wants to.

The boy’s mind brushes hers, heavy and sleepy. It feels familiar. She’s never met somebody whose mind felt familiar. Not like his does.

It’s all a trap. She mustn't fall for it.

In the middle of night cycle, Rey untangles herself from the huge hairy thing’s arms. It hurts her to, but she does it. She tiptoes past the snoring boy with his long pale throat bared like an idiot. She tiptoes to the man’s bunk.

He’s sleeping. His face isn’t exactly old, but it’s worn. Folded and leathery. She can’t say if it’s handsome or not; to her, it just looks tired.

Rey stares at him for at least an hour.

_You wouldn’t have stayed there. Not on my watch._

Tentatively, she pokes at his mind.

After she’s found what she’s found, she stands there a little longer, turning it over.

She’s going back to Jakku. That goes without question.

_Not on my watch._

The man turns over, grunting in his sleep. Rey hikes herself up on the edge of the mattress. She studies the broad, softly rising wall of his back. Then she lies down, slowly, minding her burns, tugs at his blanket, and pulls it over herself as well.

The blanket smells of him. The shirt smells of the boy. She smells of the huge hairy thing.

The man grunts again. Rey closes her eyes.

She’s going back to Jakku. Maybe, though, she doesn’t have to go back just yet.

**Author's Note:**

> 1.) Halfway through writing this I thought, "Wait, isn't this title from a book?" and it is--I haven't read _Out of the Dust_ by Karen Hesse in years, but apparently it stuck around in the back of my mind long enough to get a mention here. 
> 
> 2.) This didn't quite make it to the Han lives AU territory, but I like to think that finding Rey much earlier and adopting her as a surrogate daughter would have a butterfly effect, and so a lot of things would end up differently than they do in canon.


End file.
